Within the field of computing, many scenarios involve a storage of objects compressed within a zip archive using a compression technique. The zip archive comprises a concatenation of the compressed versions of the objects, each preceded by a local header describing the object (e.g., the filename, the compression technique selected for the object, and the compressed size), and concludes with a central directory including a set of centralized headers that identify the addresses of the local headers. In order to extract an object from the zip archive, a zip archive extractor may read the central directory, identify the address within the zip archive of the local header of the object, seek within the zip archive to the address of the compressed data, and apply the compression technique to expand the compressed object. In this manner, the zip archive extractor is capable of providing random access to the objects stored in the zip archive; e.g., accessing a particular object in the zip archive does not involve the other objects in the zip archive.